The Soul of the Apostolate by Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard OSCO (TAN) - Intro/Biography

I began reading this book recently after it was recommended by a catholic theologian who presents on a variety of traditional catholic subjects. It is about 300 pages long, so it will take some time to summarize it all on here as I slowly and methodically read through it. But so far, it is incredible...and if anything re-typing out the parts I am highlighting helps me to better retain it.

The book can be viewed/purchased directly from TAN books ($10 at the moment) on Amazon (about $14). You can also check your parish or local bookstores if they have one.

"O infinite Charity, make our wills burn with thirst for the interior life. Penetrate and flood our hearts with Thy sweetness and strength, and show them that even here on this earth there is no real happiness except in this life of imitation and sharing in Thine own life and in that of the Heart of Jesus in the bosom of the Father of all mercy and all kindness."

 A Biographical Note
- The author of this modern spiritual classic was born on the feast of St. Gregory the Great, March 1, 1858...The reason why St. Gregory the Great was so perfect in expounding the relation of action and contemplation is that, called from the cloister to the Papacy in one of the crises in the history of the Church, he found out what that relation was in the crucible of trial and labor and distraction and struggle. And the reason why Dom Chautard has been able to write so well on the same theme for our own age is that he too was so often torn by the hand of God from the cloister and made an instrument of Divine Power and Providence...
- The Chautards ran a little bookshop, and the father of the future monk was one of those purely nominal Catholics who sometimes go to Mass, but whose principles are entirely vitiated by the materialistic and utilitarian views of the middle class to which they belong. The mother was in a different category. She had more faith, and she saw to it that her children were educated as Catholics. However, neither [Jean-Baptiste] nor they had an idea of his entering religion. He went to Marseilles to study economics at the university, with a commercial career in mind...[but] affected by the simple devotion a priest had to his Breviary, he began to ask himself why he did not pray more himself.
- [He found in a Catholic youth club] more than a tame and sheepish attempt to rival the attractions of the dance hall and the cafe by vainly trying to beat them at their own game of pleasing and entertaining human nature. There was something more, something that appealed to a much deeper and more urgent and more vital necessity: faith, supernatural charity, a deep and simple and unbreakable solidarity among souls united, as he was to discover, in Christ. And, as a result of all this, he began to taste "that peace which the world cannot give."

- He was admitted as a postulant at the Trappist Abbey of Aiguebelle in 1877. Here he began to learn, with an inexpressible joy, how to live the contemplative life...He began to live the life of a White Monk, that life of obscurity, obedience, silence, poverty, solitude, hidden in the "secret of God's face," that is, of His presence and of His will...a life of ceaseless praise.
- [In that time], Aiguebelle was faced with complete ruin...The Abbot took the bold step of sending him to Paris to try and use his ingenuity to save his community. But all Fr. Chautard's native ability and eloquence and learning and economics proved useless. Finally, he threw himself down in prayer at the shrine of Our Lady of Victories...the rest of the story can be guessed.

- [Eventually] the order, Sept-Fons, needed a new abbot. Dom Chautard was elected. He made use of his right to refuse, but when Dom Sebastian appealed to the Pope, Leo XIII expressed his desire that Dom Chautard accept, and he yielded to the will of God.
- In 1901, when one of the frequent attacks against the Church burst out again in France, Dom Chautard was chosen to represent the Cistercians of the Strict Observance in Paris...the Order at large was spared. Others were by no means so fortunate.

- During the First World War, Dom Chautard gave shelter at Sept-Fons to a community of Belgian Cistercians, another community from Palestine, the orphans from an asylum at Arras, and the inmates of an old men's home. Dom Chautard added to this a much more important work of mercy in the spiritual order. A magazine for French priests, conscripted and sent to the front [lines]. [When these priests returned from war], they needed nothing so much as the consolations and medicine of a doctrine like Dom Chautard's, which placed the greatest emphasis on the one source of all our strength: God's grace, obtained in ever greater abundance by a life of prayer and mortification.
- THE FRUITFULNESS OF AN ACTIVE LIFE [HAS] ITS ROOTS DEEP IN PRAYER AND PENANCE.
- Dom Chautard's keen eye had discovered a glaring inconsistency in the reaction of a certain type of Catholic leader. He observed that some priests, some organizers of Catholic Action, imagined that they could fight political enemies with more or less worldly and political weapons. In defending the Church against state persecutions, they thought the most important thing was to gain and preserve political and social power.
A few items come to mind here:

St. Louis de Montfort Secret of the Rosary 
Jesus in a vision to Dominic: "Dominic, I rejoice to see that you are not 

relying on your own wisdom and that, rather than seek the empty praise of men, 

you are working with great humility for the salvation of souls."

1 Corinthians 2:4-8

 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. 

6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

- Such apostles tended to congratulate themselves when they had raised large sums of money, or when the churches were filled with great throngs of people, without reference to what might be going on in the souls of all those who were present. To the eyes of the Cistercian Abbot, a man who had learned his wisdom close to God, in the silence of the cloister, before the Tabernacle, there was a deep-seated and subtly pernicious error to all this.
- The Church is built of living stones. It is built of saints. And saints are made only by the grace of God and the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, not by speeches and publicity and campaigns which are all doomed to sterility without the essential means of prayer and mortification.
- Dom Chautard saw that all this came from the subtle infection of Modernism and kindred heresies, bred of contact with a purely materialistic and secular culture. And he, like the saintly Pontiff under whose reign he was then living, saw that the only remedy was a return to the fundamentals of Christian Doctrine in all the power and beauty of their traditional presentation. (see also here)
- The Soul of the Apostolate recommends itself with even more urgency in our time, when the world is barely recovering from the most frightful social cataclysm in the history of man, with no prospect of anything brighter in the future.
- [Dom Chautard] had an unconquerable love of Christ and of His Immaculate Mother...steering clear of the two equally noxious extremes of quietism and the heresy of works.
- In his later years, he was persecuted by ill-health, and spent many nights without sleep, in between his days of arduous work for his Order and for souls. But all this, far from breaking his morale and leading him into the morass of self-pitying discouragement, only intensified his union with God...a deep interior life...a charity, indeed, which was hungry.
- If there is one concept that is capable of summing up Dom Chautard's spirituality, it is "GOD ALONE." God in everything, God in anything, God in His will, God in other men, God present in his own soul.



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